A lot of games do mocap on the face but what strikes me most about BG3 is how much body language the characters use. They aren’t an emotive head on a stiff body switching between obvious static poses. Dame Aylin isn’t just shouting at me she’s leaning into it, arms up, fists clenched and shaking. It really adds a lot to the character performances.
Astarion's mocap in particular is just excellent. He's so deeply weird and it's completely appropriate. I love how during most normal gameplay, his whole body is constantly on the edge between breaking into raucous laughter or total exasperation. Kudos to the actor(s) and techs that put the whole package together.
I knew having a Lucifer type character would be one of the more entertaining features of having a vampire as a party member before I even knew he was a vampire
Similarly, I feel like they did a great job in Horizon: Forbidden West. A lot of the animations are rote, sure, but then there’s facial expressions, like Kotallo thinking about Zo’s abilities, that are just amazingly human.
Gaming has stepped up the production in recent years, and the standouts are obvious.
Saying “gaming has stepped up” while praising the most over-hyped, bland-ass open-world action series in recent history doesn’t lend much credibility to your comment.
Horizon hit a niche that hasn’t been beaten into the ground? An Ubisoft style open world game with far too many collectables and garbage to waste time?
It’s not treading new ground from a genre standpoint.
But the combat is a style that isn’t really very common in open world games, and the commenter you are replying to specifically was talking about the story, characters, and world building…all three of which set Horizon apart from other games, IMO.
Calling DnD bland always strikes me as funny. It's bland compared to most modern fantasy for the same reason Seinfeld is bland compared to most modern sitcoms: it's one of the the foundations upon which most of the rest of what we've consumed since its inception is built. We've seen all the innovations upon its formula, so going back to the original can feel lacking if you don't bother to think critically about why it feels that way.
The important thing is that even without all those innovations, they nailed the source material and created the richest experience they could within its boundaries. If it's not for you, it's not for you, and that's fine - no game is for everyone. But it's a pity you dismiss it so flippantly, and I hope one day you can grow to see what's executed well in a project even when its end goal isn't to your tastes. Or just grow out of trolling, whichever applies. I'm not going to pick that apart.
Oh, you might be right. That's even odder to me then; I haven't played any of the Horizon games myself, but I find their setting premise fascinating. Is it so poorly executed?
If I misunderstood, my bad, but I'll leave it since there are people who rant about BG3 in a similar direction.
I have to say that I played Horizon: Zero Dawn, and after the first couple hours it felt very samey. Basically a Ubisoft open-world game with slightly better movement and combat. Haven’t tried the new one, but I don’t think any open-world will ever really catch me again like Elden Ring did.
That's a pity. Still, the setting (time period/tech levels/world population composition etc) is worth taking away as something good that people can learn from, I hope, even if they messed it up so badly.
It took me several hours to get into HZD, but once it hit its stride it really hooked me. The opening few hours are quite weak, IMO. It takes that time for the story to start to reveal, and for the more deliberate pace of combat to make itself apparent.
I personally haven’t played Horizon myself; but from what I saw if it, it doesn’t look poorly made; it just looks by the numbers. Over the shoulder “cinematic” open world game with that Sony trope of the protagonist telling you the solution to a puzzle upon seeing it.
If my impression is accurate I would compare it to Quake II or Blue Beetle, if you are already a fan of Sony’s style of games you’ll most likely love Horizon, if you don’t like that kind of game then there isn’t much Horizon can offer you.
“Why do we need writers on staff all the time? They can just write the story and then we can fire them! What’s the worst that could happen? We have to do millions of dollars worth of rework because we didn’t pay someone five figures to stick around 24/7 and modify the story to fit the efforts we’ve already put in? Pshh…”
You could. But that's also if it's the only game you play and you don't boot up Sea of Stars, Quake, Halo, Goldeneye, Yakuza, Unraveled, or what have you. I don't have a Game Pass subscription, but the math on it makes a lot of sense for a lot of people.
Yeah. If you play a lot of little indie games, and tend to only play through them once, it’s an absurd bargain.
It’s also great in that you can try a lot of stuff without having to research it at all first, so you get really nice surprises sometimes. And you can try things risk-free, so sometimes I’ll try something I wouldn’t have expected to like and wouldn’t have bought and be pleasantly surprised. It can open up entire genres to people this way, as an intro to different types of games.
I do tend to buy a month or two, drop out, then buy another month when the catalogue is different though.
In this scenario above, playing Starfield and it being too enormous to finish in a month or two, you'd hardly have any time to enjoy these other games either.
You could spend all of your free time for one month playing Starfield and have finished it for $17. You could functionally "rent" 17 games for $1 each to get a feel for each of them, one of them being Starfield, to decide which ones you want to stick with. You could beat two smaller games each month and spend the rest of your time playing Starfield, and four months later still come out ahead of the $70 Starfield would have cost you. There are lots of ways that math works out for you to come out ahead.
Baldur's Gate 3 came out less than a month ago, and I already know at least two people on my friends list who've beaten it, plus several others who put over 60 hours into it in the past two weeks, according to Steam. There are plenty of people who could get through Starfield in one month for $17.
Looking at my game purchases a year and as a pretty heavy gamer, I come out just over the cost of game pass. Big thing is that I get to keep my games without needing to re-up the subscription.
Yeah right now when there’s a lot of games coming out it seems great, but middle of COVID I remember nothing was coming out, and I would have had to keep paying for the games I had already played.
$9.99 for a month of gamepass PC, or $10.99 for console (ultimate you’re paying for cloud access or online play, so it’s a disingenuous comparison) You can play starfield for a month, then buy it for 20% off through gamepass, so $55.99. $55.99+10.99 = $66.98.
So you basically get a $11 month-long trial, then $2 off the full price if you decide you like it enough to keep.
If you were okay with “man, after getting away from a life of crime, is immediately pulled back in by people who don’t have his best interests at heart and will use him to betray others before eventually getting betrayed themselves” for over two decades, I don’t think you need to worry. Took until RDR2 to break that mold.
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